Intellect PlusCricket
620 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 9 of 11.
Australia's constitution never mentions its prime ministerAustralia's most powerful political job does not appear anywhere in its constitution. The drafters assumed Westminster conventions were so firmly rooted that writing them down was…
Pakistan's women cricketers faced court cases and threats just to take the fieldWhen sisters Shaiza and Sharmeen Khan tried to start women's cricket in Pakistan in 1996, they met court cases and even death threats, and the government refused permission for a …- Britain's Parliament granted almost every Chartist demand, just decades too lateIn the early 1800s, Old Sarum, a borough with seven voters, sent two members to Westminster, and so did Dunwich, a town that had largely slipped into the sea. Working people petit…
- Pat Cummins waited more than five years between his first two TestsPat Cummins won his debut Test at 18 with six wickets and the winning boundary, then vanished from Test cricket for 1,946 days with a broken-down back. He came back to become the …
- Why premium channels start films at odd times like 7:05Most television runs on the hour and half hour, but premium movie channels happily start a film at 4:40 in the afternoon. The reason lies in how they earn money: with subscribers …
Penance and repentance share a root but split Christianity over deedsPenance and repentance grew from the same Latin word for a change of heart, yet during the Reformation they came to stand for rival answers to one question: does forgiveness depen…
The old British penny once had to contain a penny's worth of copperIn 1797 Britain insisted a coin should hold metal worth its face value, so each new copper penny weighed a full ounce. The result was a coin so big, with a rim so thick, that peop…- Pakistan's hockey team once won everything, including the very first World CupIn 1978 Pakistan's field hockey side became the first team ever to win three major international titles in a single year. Hockey is the country's national sport, and for three dec…
- Pakistan's cricket team earned its reputation as brilliant and unpredictable earlyJust seven days after an innings defeat in their first ever Test in 1952, Pakistan crushed India by an innings, with Fazal Mahmood taking 12 wickets. That swing from collapse to t…
- Pakistan's T20 league began in exile and grew into a billion-rupee businessThe Pakistan Super League played its first match in February 2016 not in Pakistan but in the United Arab Emirates, after two earlier attempts to launch it had failed. A decade lat…
English may be named after a fishhook-shaped coastlineThe word English comes from Englisċ, meaning belonging to the Angles. Where the Angles got their name is murkier: perhaps from a Germanic root about narrowness or shallow coastal …
An English scholar's Latin reform helped French become a written languageCharlemagne asked the English deacon Alcuin to tidy up Latin in his realm. Alcuin insisted words be pronounced as spelled, which made church sermons baffling to ordinary Romance s…
Britain once lost 11 days and moved New Year from March to JanuaryIn 1752 people in England, Wales, Ireland and the American colonies saw September lose 11 days as their calendar switched to the Gregorian system. The same year, the start of the …
Old Trafford lost the opening match of its own lifeManchester United moved into their grand new stadium on 19 February 1910 and promptly lost 4-3 to Liverpool. A reporter still called it the handsomest and most remarkable ground h…
Tug of war and croquet were once Olympic sportsThe early modern Olympics handed out medals in croquet, tug of war, polo, jeu de paume and even motorboat racing. All eight of those sports have since vanished. Meanwhile breakdan…
London's airport rules chopped five floors off Canary Wharf's towerOne Canada Square was drawn at 55 storeys and 263 metres. That would have poked into the flight path for nearby London City Airport, so the architects removed five floors. Even tr…
One-day international cricket was invented because of rainIn January 1971 the first three days of a Test between Australia and England in Melbourne were washed out. Rather than send everyone home, officials abandoned the Test and staged …- Europe's busiest shopping street was once the road to the gallowsAround 300,000 people a day walk Oxford Street, Europe's busiest shopping street. For centuries it was Tyburn Road, the route condemned prisoners took from Newgate to the Tyburn g…
- Pakistan's cricket board has been suspended and rebuilt again and againFour times the governing body of Pakistani cricket has had its rules suspended and its running handed to an emergency committee. Chairmen have been appointed by presidents, remove…
The Old Bailey's Lady Justice wears no blindfold, on purposeAtop the dome of London's most famous criminal court stands a gilded Lady Justice holding sword and scales, and her eyes are uncovered. The court explains that she was never blind…
Baseball's Hall of Fame was built on a myth to rescue a villageCooperstown became baseball's shrine because of a story that is not true: that Abner Doubleday invented the game there in the 1830s. A sewing-machine heir used that legend to lure…- NatWest spent 17 years partly owned by British taxpayersOn 30 May 2025 NatWest became a fully private bank again, ending a 17-year stretch that began with a £45 billion government rescue. At one point the state held 84% of the group. I…
- How a dormant shell company became India's biggest media groupNetwork18 began life in 1996 as an inactive finance firm with no clear purpose. A regulatory squeeze turned it into the vehicle for a fast-growing news empire, and runaway expansi…
Channel Nine was Still the One, until the ratings said otherwiseAustralia's Channel Nine put the first person on the nation's television screens in 1956 and later dominated so thoroughly that it won 77 of 80 ratings weeks across 2003 and 2004.…
North India has been the stage for nearly every Indian empireFrom the brick cities of the Indus Valley to the Mughal court, the plains and hills of northern India hosted one great power after another: the Vedic chiefdoms, the Mauryas, the G…- North London grew late, then split families over footballFor centuries London barely spread north of its old Roman wall: the ground beyond was marshy and the roads poor. Canals and railways finally turned those rural parishes into subur…
NPR nearly went bankrupt, then got a record gift from McDonald's moneyIn 1983 America's public radio network ran up a deficit of nearly $7 million and came close to collapse. Twenty years later the widow of McDonald's founder Ray Kroc left it over $…
Why a miniseries lets its characters change, and a soap opera cannotIn 1977, 130 million Americans watched the finale of Roots, a 71 percent share of the audience and at the time the highest-rated programme ever broadcast. Its secret was partly sc…- The ticket examiner from Ranchi who won every limited-overs trophyBetween 2001 and 2003, MS Dhoni checked tickets on trains out of Kharagpur for Indian Railways. A few years later he was captaining India, and by 2013 he had become the only capta…
MSN began as a dial-up service launched alongside Windows 95On August 24, 1995, Microsoft released Windows 95 and, with it, The Microsoft Network, a paid dial-up online service. Three decades later MSN is a free news portal. In between, th…- From three O-levels and a Brixton flat to Downing StreetJohn Major left school just before turning 16 with three O-levels, spent months of 1962 out of work, and was once passed over for a bus conductor's job because of his height. Less…
- Jonny Bairstow made his best runs when Yorkshire were in troubleIn 2015 Jonny Bairstow played only nine County Championship matches yet scored 1,108 runs at an average of 92.33. Wisden noted that all five of his centuries that summer came with…
- The Somerset schoolboy who became England's greatest white-ball cricketerJos Buttler completed the run-out in the super over that won England the 2019 World Cup, then captained the side to the 2022 T20 World Cup title while top-scoring for his country.…
- Middlesex nearly folded in 1871, saved by a single voteSeven years after it was founded, Middlesex County Cricket Club was so short of money that members voted on whether to carry on. The result was 7 to 6 in favour. A few years later…
London's Millennium Bridge wobbled because walkers fell into step with itOn 10 June 2000, some 90,000 people crossed London's sleek new footbridge over the Thames, and it began to sway sideways alarmingly. Two days later it shut for nearly two years. T…- An Islington pub kept charging in shillings for twenty years after decimalisationBritain switched to decimal coins on 15 February 1971, but the King's Head in Islington did not. Its theatre founder, Dan Crawford, disliked the change, so for more than twenty ye…
- Jack Hobbs scored 199 first-class centuries, yet nobody noticed him as a teenagerNo cricketer has made more first-class runs or hundreds than Jack Hobbs: 61,760 runs and 199 centuries. Yet as a Cambridge teenager he was an apprentice gas fitter whom no coach a…
- James Anderson bowled with his eyes shut and took 704 Test wicketsAt the instant he releases the ball, James Anderson's head is down and his eyes are closed. Coaches tried to fix that action, and a former England fast bowler predicted in 2003 it…
- Jason Gillespie's first century was a Test double hundred as night-watchmanSent in late to protect the batting order, fast bowler Jason Gillespie stayed and stayed, finishing on 201 not out against Bangladesh on his 31st birthday. It was his first first-…
- Jeff Thomson hurled a cricket ball at 160 km/h with a javelin thrower's slingMost fast bowlers show the batter the ball as they run in. Jeff Thomson hid it behind his right knee, then slung it like a javelin. In 1975 high-speed cameras in Perth clocked him…
The UAE cricket league that lets teams field nine overseas playersMost franchise T20 leagues cap overseas players at four or five per side. The International League T20 in the United Arab Emirates allows nine of the eleven, while insisting on on…
India's Irani Trophy began as a one-off anniversary matchIn March 1960 Indian cricket staged a single match to mark 25 years of the Ranji Trophy: the national champions against a side drawn from everyone else. It proved too good to drop…
The Ironman was built by stitching three Hawaiian races into one dayThe first Ironman simply glued together three existing Oahu events: a rough-water swim, a round-the-island bike race and the Honolulu Marathon. Moved to the lava fields of the Big…
Ishan Kishan turned his first ODI hundred into the fastest double centuryIn December 2022 Ishan Kishan reached 200 against Bangladesh in just 126 balls, a dozen fewer than Chris Gayle's record. At 24 he was also the youngest to make an ODI double, and …- India Today began with 5,000 copies and grew into India's most-read magazineLaunched in 1975 by a printing-press owner with his daughter as editor and his son as publisher, India Today started tiny. Within four years it passed 100,000 copies, and it went …
- India's women waited nearly fifty years to lift their first World CupIndia's women played their first Test in 1976, decades after the men. Twice they reached a World Cup final and lost. Then in November 2025, after chasing down 339 against Australi…
- Founded in 1885, the Congress party led India's long road to independenceWhen 72 years of struggle ended with independence in 1947, one organisation had led much of the way. The Indian National Congress, founded in 1885, was the first modern nationalis…
Each IPL match is now worth more than thirteen million dollars in TV rightsBorn in 2007 partly to crush a rebel competition, the Indian Premier League became the richest cricket tournament on earth. Only America's NFL earns more per match. Its franchise …
India's railway carries almost seven billion passengers a year on 13,000 daily trainsIndia's first railway, in 1837, hauled granite in Madras. Today the national network runs more than 13,000 passenger trains every day, carried 6.905 billion journeys in a single y…
India built a football league on the IPL model, with Del Piero as baitIndia has played organised football since the Durand Cup of 1888, yet had no national league until 1996. In 2014 promoters borrowed the cricket playbook: city franchises, celebrit…- Cricket's world body began as a three-nation club meeting at Lord'sIn 1909 delegates from England, Australia and South Africa gathered at Lord's and formed the Imperial Cricket Conference. More than a century later that small imperial club has be…
- India lost its first Test at Lord's, then conquered world cricketIndia lost its first Test, at Lord's in 1932, by 158 runs. In 1983 the side returned to the same ground and beat the two-time champions West Indies in the World Cup final, and it …
- IMDb began as one Bristol engineer's hobby list of filmsIMDb started as a hobby. From 1987 Col Needham, an English engineer at Hewlett-Packard in Bristol, logged every film he watched, and in 1990 he shared search scripts with a Usenet…
Britain planned its war museum while the First World War still ragedBritain decided to build a museum of the First World War while the fighting was still going on. Proposed in February 1917 and approved by the War Cabinet within days, the Imperial…- Imran Khan taught Pakistan reverse swing and won its first World CupPakistan had never won the Cricket World Cup until 1992, when its captain, Imran Khan, top-scored with 72 in the final and took the winning wicket himself. It capped a career that…
India's hockey team went unbeaten at the Olympics for almost three decadesBetween 1928 and 1956 India's hockey team did not lose a single Olympic match, collecting six gold medals in a row on a 30–0 winning run. Twice it won the whole tournament without…- Hugo Weaving voiced Megatron without ever watching a Transformers filmHugo Weaving gave Megatron his snarl in three Transformers films, and admitted he had never seen the first one while recording the second. He had never met the director, who brief…
- Hurling sends a cork ball faster than 150 kilometres an hour off an ash stickA well-struck sliotar can leave the hurley at over 150 kilometres an hour and fly 110 metres. Irish players chase it, catch it barehanded and balance it on a stick while sprinting…
- Parliament once sold Hyde Park for cash, deer included at extra costIn 1652 Parliament put Hyde Park on the market for ready money. It fetched 17,000 pounds, plus a separate 765 pounds and change for the deer living there. Eight years later the re…
- Ian Bell won the 2005 Ashes and still called it his lowest pointEngland reclaimed the Ashes in 2005 and Ian Bell collected an MBE for his part. Privately he counted it a low point. He averaged about 17 in the series, bagged a pair at The Oval,…